Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course

PIONEERS Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass worked together on abolition, but then had a bitter split over who should be first to get the right to vote  women or blacks.Credit
Photographs by Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Washington

BARRING some seismic scandal, unforeseen late entry (“Al Who?”), or unlikely surge by John Edwards, it is wholly inevitable that the race for the Democratic nomination will end next August in an epochal first.

Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. One of them will take the stage at Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and soaked in history as a culminating figure of one of the great ideological movements of the last century — civil rights or women’s rights.

To this point, both Mr. Obama and (to a lesser degree) Mrs. Clinton have been diligent in trying not to identify too closely with either movement. Mr. Obama rarely mentions his race explicitly, leaving the heavy rhetoric of his groundbreaking potential to his wife, Michelle (who in a speech in November spoke of lifting “that veil of impossibility that keeps us down and keeps our children down”). Mrs. Clinton has made more direct appeals to mothers and daughters and “making history,” but has for the most part predicated her candidacy on the masculine virtues of toughness, resolve and her extensive experience in the (male-dominated) realm of politics and government.

Still, whether the candidate wants the mantle or not, whoever wins the nomination will be bestowed (or bludgeoned) with the hopes and legacy of a movement. The victory will be a benchmark moment for the American promise of equality, and the Democrats will add to their partisan quiver a feel-great story that could buoy them in the fall. “Americans are looking for a way to break barriers,” Karl Rove said last week in an interview with National Public Radio (not that Mr. Rove, President Bush’s chief political maharishi, is at risk of helping either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton do this). “They would love to elect a woman president; they would love to elect an African-American president.”

But feel-great story or not, they can’t pick both. Someone will lose. Such is football, Yahtzee and elections. And either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton — and the movements they represent — will be consigned, for the time being, to a status of “almost.”

Breakthrough politics can be a zero-sum game, with distinct groups striving for a finite piece of the change pie. It brings to mind that the civil rights movement and the women’s movement have a long, complicated history dating back to abolitionism and the origins of modern feminism. While they have been philosophical allies, sharing goals and ideals, there have also been periodic collisions that could bespeak an inevitable friction as Barack v. Hillary moves forward and — potentially — in directions far less seemly than they have to date.

“The movements have been so deeply linked, and usually in harmony,” said Sara Evans, author of “Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left” and a historian at the University of Minnesota. “But there will always be points of tension, too,” Ms. Evans said, especially when the broad ideals that blacks and women have typically shared — in their fight for the vote, non-discrimination and economic equality — give way to the nitty-gritty of reaching consensus, setting policy, passing legislation and, in the case of elections, making choices.

One bitter case from the 19th century involved a split between the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the women’s rights’ pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was herself a fervent abolitionist, and a close ally of Douglass, who later confined herself to the cause of women’s equality. These ideals would eventually clash, resulting in increasingly divisive rhetoric that reached a harsh climax after Stanton condemned the 15th amendment — which gave black men the right to vote but left out women of all races — as something that would establish “an aristocracy of sex on this continent.” She also alluded to the “lower orders” like Irish, blacks, Germans, Chinese.

During a heated meeting in New York City’s Steinway Hall in 1869, Stanton wondered, “Shall American statesmen ... so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South?” At which point, Douglass rose, paid tribute to Stanton’s years of work on civil rights for all, and replied, “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

Blacks won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870; women won theirs with the 19th Amendment, in 1920, a half-century later. Each of their causes would stutter-step along at sometimes different paces, but usually in some loose if not formal concert.

Some of the women’s rights giants of the 20th century took public positions, or made public gestures, in the service of civil rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, while first lady, memorably resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 after that organization refused to allow the black contralto Marian Anderson the right to perform at Constitution Hall. (Franklin Roosevelt got Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes to allow a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, drawing a crowd estimated at over 75,000.) The civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s were “the starting point for what many people have called ‘the rights revolution,’ ” said James T. Patterson, professor emeritus of history at Brown University and author of “Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy,” among other books. Some activists would grumble that women were under-represented in the leadership rungs. “They complained that their role was to cook dinner and serve as sex partners,” Mr. Patterson said. (In one notably bad joke, the black activist Stokely Carmichael was asked what position women held in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to which he replied, “Prone.”)

Women seemed to hit their stride in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Were they benefitting disproportionately from affirmative action, black men wondered? Later in the 70s and early 80s, blue-collar white women blamed affirmative action for their own economic hardship and job insecurity. And, experts say, there has always been some measure of discord between economically disadvantaged black feminists, who often emphasize pocketbook issues, and more affluent white feminists, with a greater focus on charged political issues like abortion rights.

In recent decades, the more public instances of blacks and women at loggerheads have involved a striving for milestones and power at the top, as opposed to minimal enfranchisement at the bottom. The case of the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, accused of sexual harassment by a former employee, Anita Hill, offered a riveting public dispute that cut to the core of racial and gender identities in late 20th-century America. But the vast majority of blacks — men, and especially women — were aligned against the nomination of the conservative Mr. Thomas to begin with, and he eventually won confirmation by a narrow margin, largely along party lines.

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TWO MOVEMENTS Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem with Jesse Jackson, superstars of their eras.Credit
Bettmann/Corbis

Indeed, the causes of black progress and women’s progress, and any cross-tensions between them, have largely existed within the Democratic Party. Walter Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1984, faced pressure to consider blacks and women as his running mate. He made a drawn-out show of his deliberations, considering black candidates (like the mayors of Philadelphia and Los Angeles), before settling on Representative Geraldine Ferraro.

It’s not clear how seriously Mr. Mondale considered the mayors, or whether he would have picked Ms. Ferraro if he had had a better chance of defeating Ronald Reagan (who went on to bulldoze him in November, taking 49 states). But a notion had clearly taken hold that it would be only a matter of time before a woman or a minority candidate would seriously challenge for the presidency.

Who would figure that both would happen the same year?

“We’re on the verge of a stunning first,” Mr. Patterson said.

Yet the core challenge of both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton is the degree to which each can transcend the first-ness of their candidacies. “The question is, How do you become a universal figure when you represent movements that have claimed the right of equality for you in your difference?” said Joan Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In fundamental ways, both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are kindred products of campus and community politics in their respective eras. Until recently, the tone of the Clinton-Obama race has been relatively civil and respectful, and — with a few exceptions — largely free of racial or gender-based rhetoric or offense. Mrs. Clinton vied aggressively for support among blacks, following on the great good will engendered by Bill Clinton during his campaigns and presidency. And Mr. Obama enjoyed significant support among women, helped in part by the strong and visible role that Michelle Obama had played in his campaign.

“Many of us just hope to high heaven that this continues,” Ms. Scott said of the campaign’s civil tone and relative color- and gender-blindness.

Alas, the campaign has taken a nastier turn in recent days, and the development has coincided, not surprisingly, with the start of voting, the advent of winners and losers, the harsh divvying of the electoral pie.

Women rallied to Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire — 57 percent — after what many perceived as an unfair piling on by Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards in a debate on Saturday. (Mr. Obama was tagged as being dismissive and patronizing after he told Mrs. Clinton she was “likable enough.”) In post-election surveys, many women said they were both heartened by Mrs. Clinton’s choked-up response to a voter’s question on Monday, and incensed by the ridicule she endured in its aftermath.

Likewise, many blacks took offense to a remark Mrs. Clinton made in an interview with Fox News that struck some as dismissive of the contributions of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (She had pointed out that it took the leadership of a president, Lyndon Johnson, to bring about “Dr. King’s dream.”)

To many, the comments echoed a building tone of disrespect that Mrs. Clinton had been expressing toward Mr. Obama — pooh-poohing his commitment to change as merely “hoping for it,” implying that her fellow United States senator was all talk. Bill Clinton took things even further, ranting against the media for not challenging the “fairy tale” that he said Mr. Obama’s rise was predicated on. (He was referring specifically to the perception that Mr. Obama was totally pure in his opposition to the Iraq war.)

This infuriated prominent blacks like the Democratic operative and commentator Donna Brazile and Representative James E Clyburn of the critical primary state South Carolina, both of whom have been close to the Clintons and have remained neutral in the race. For Mr. Clinton “to go after Obama, using ‘fairy tale,’ calling him a ‘kid,’ as he did last week, it’s an insult,” Ms. Brazile said on CNN. “And I tell you, as an African- American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.”

Even more striking were remarks from Mr. Clyburn, the House majority whip and veteran of the civil rights movement, who also happens to be the leading black official in Congress. In a sense, Mr. Clyburn’s neutrality to this point in the Democratic race has marked a kind of sensible center in a potentially divisive campaign.

But that center appeared in some jeopardy on Thursday after Mr. Clyburn said he was re-thinking his position after the remarks by the Clintons, which he said distorted the history of civil rights.

“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” Mr. Clyburn told Carl Hulse, a reporter for The New York Times. “It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.”

But so goes the bumpy road to history.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page 41 of the New York edition with the headline: Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe